


kosher-style chinese food

by mintpearlvoice



Series: clown meme scream team [2]
Category: IT - Stephen King
Genre: Body Horror, Eddie Kaspbrak Lives, Eddie Kaspbrak Loves Richie Tozier, Gen, M/M, Multi, Pennywise (IT) is His Own Warning, Richie Tozier Loves Eddie Kaspbrak, Sad Stanley Uris, Stanley Uris Is A Badass, Stanley Uris Lives, Suicidal Ideation, look your depression in the eyes and call it an ugly-ass clown
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-06
Updated: 2019-10-07
Packaged: 2020-11-26 00:28:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,194
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20921156
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mintpearlvoice/pseuds/mintpearlvoice
Summary: Stan makes it to the restaurant and meets up with the rest of the Losers.However, things still go horribly wrong. He hasn't yet escaped the grip of his past- or of his mind.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> tws for whole fic: suicidal ideation, body horror, vomiting, pennywise being pennywise

Stan staggered into the Chinese restaurant twenty minutes after everyone else, right when everyone had given up hope of him arriving that night. “Does anyone have some Advil? My head’s been killing me. I think maybe I’m developing migraines or something.”

“Hello to you too,” Ben quipped. “God, Stan, it’s so good to see you. We were worried your plane had crashed, or that you were stuck halfway across the country.”

Mike beamed at him. “I’m so glad you’re here. I was just thinking how much more of a fighting chance we’d have with you on our side.”

Beverly couldn’t help but agree. She’d been worried when she hadn’t seen his name in the guestbook at the Derry Town House. Just like when they were kids, she wanted to give him a big hug and ruffle his hair. “Are you still watching birds, Stan?”

Although he still looked tired and wan, something unclenched in her chest when he smiled. “A lot of my birdwatching friends say that their wives don’t understand why they want to go out and look at birds, but Patty’s been fantastic. She’s such a great person, amazing sense of humor, I’m so lucky to have met her. I look at her doing anything, literally anything, and I’m just like… that’s my wife! Did you know she calls my van ‘Sedanley?’ Because it’s, you know, a sedan. She’s so supportive. It was her idea to put birdfeeders up in our yard, even. We saw a flock of painted buntings just the other day.” He showed Beverly a picture. It was a picture of his wife.

“That’s a picture of your wife.”

“I know- isn’t she beautiful? Wait, hold on, you probably thought I was going to show you some birds…” He showed her some birds. She adored them.

“Those are gorgeous! I’m absolutely designing an evening gown based on their plumage.”

Eddie, unzipping his shoulder bag: “I have some ibuprofen, but you’re supposed to take them after you eat. Not on an empty stomach.”

This was not what Stan wanted to hear. “Come on, seriously?”

Eddie rolled his eyes and handed over the pills. “Fine, but don’t blame me if you develop an ulcer.”

He dry-swallowed three.

Richie grinned and slipped into a Brooklyn-Taxi-Driver voice. “Ya look like shit, Stanley. Come sit by me so I look better by comparison! This here old face needs the contrast.”

Richie was right, to be honest. Ghostly pale, sweating in his suit jacket even though the air conditioning was barely balmy, curls matted to his forehead. It was probably just jet lag. Hadn’t he always gotten motion sickness in cars when they were kids? She wasn’t going to pry. She’d be polite.

While she tried not to blush every time Bill looked at her, Stan and Eddie were having a side conversation about their marriages.

“It sounds like your wife’s taken this all really well,” said Eddie, and Stan smiled.

“Yeah, she was really upset that we’ve been unable to have kids… but it’s been really good to get it out in the open, and in the end I think it’s made our marriage stronger. We’re thinking about adopting, actually.”

Why did her instincts keep nudging her to watch Stanley more closely? The same instincts that told her when to take a blow to get someone’s fury over with and when to duck to save herself from a broken nose- somehow, for some reason, they were buzzing insistent and hard.

“So what’s it like still living in Derry?” Richie asked.

Mike sighed. “To be honest? Completely shitty. I had to explain to one of the teens working at the library why it wasn’t okay to get some face paint and pretend to be me for Halloween, and for the first ten or so minutes of that conversation she was genuinely convinced it was a compliment.”

Stan nodded. “I get it. Out here, things are different from the cities. You can’t expect people to, you know, show some fucking human decency.”

“The news absolutely proves that,” Eddie muttered.

Beverly’s plan was to ask everyone a bunch of questions so that no one would ask her about Tom. “So, Bill, what’s your work-in-progress going to be about? And have you hired a costume designer for the TV adaptation of your novellas yet?”

Richie shoved a handful of appetizer crunchy noodles in his mouth. “God, are they really calling that show ‘Maine,’ just because all your books are set there? Honestly, that’s such a stupid name. They might as well call it ‘Cars that Eat People’ or ‘I Did LSD In College And It Made Me Feel Weird.’”

When Ben and Stanley, neither of whom read horror, shot him confused looks: “Come on, the talking dog who appears to the main characters in The Cannibals was totally a metaphor for hallucinogens. Like, they can fuck your mind up, or they can open it, but either way, you’re seeing some shit.”

“Okay, sure, you’re right about that. But it was a liberal arts campus in Vermont- can you blame me?”

“The new book,” Eddie prompted. “Dude, I ugly cried after I read the one about those twins who can lift things with their minds being chased by the government, and I don’t even plan on having kids.”

Stan nodded. “I’m sure whatever you’re working on is great. The sooner you get it out to the world, the better.”

Bill smiled sheepishly, accepting the praise as was his due. “It’s pretty high-concept. It’s based on the work of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, you know, the poet- unbearably pretentious, probably- her poem The Battle of Marathon, but it’s far-future science fiction. Well, the title’s based on it, at least. The characters have to travel to alternate dimensions to gather an army and stop a merciless invading force from destroying their homes. There’s a man from the far future, a man from an alternate 1500s, and a woman from our time, and they need to confront alternate-dimension duplicates of themselves. In the end, the marathon of the title is metaphorical- about how the longest race we have to run in life is the effort to outpace our flaws.”

“That doesn’t sound pretentious at all,” Mike said fervently. “I think it has universal themes- fish out of water, the battle against the self, the desire to protect one’s home.”

“Yeah, but my editor Susan thinks-“

“So clearly what you should do is fire Susan and hire Mike,” Stan suggested, and everyone laughed.

After a pause, Stan glanced towards the door. “We’ve been waiting a while for our food, haven’t we? Hope they get it out of the oven before it burns.”

Richie nodded. “Mood. I mean, how long does it take to make egg rolls? Don’t they just have to, like, heat everything up? Surely they aren’t making it from scratch.”

“You know, this is the least scheduled vacation I’ve been on in months,” Ben mused. “Usually I have such a packed itinerary… I’m fine with certain death, as long as it’s preceded by a nice long nap.”

Beverly saw an opportunity to ask another question. “What was everyone’s most recent vacation?”

Stan was the first to reply, his tone cheerful. “Pittsburgh. We went last spring, in late May. The Andy Warhol Museum was fantastic, genuinely awe-inspiring, and my wife loved the conservatory and botanical gardens. It’s going to kill me. You’d really like the Cathedral of Learning, Bill. Gorgeous building, all these columns and arches and fancy architecture things. I took some amazing pictures of the city skyline at the West End Viewing Point, and something else I found interesting was the Monongahela Incline, which is the world’s oldest cable car or something like that. My absolute favorite afternoon was when we visited the Beechview Greenway, though. It’s in my head.”

Beverly did a mental review of what he’d said. All of it.

She hadn’t imagined any of it.

Something else was talking to them from inside Stan’s body, using Stan’s words. And Stan was trying to fight back.

Get it out, Beverly realized. That was the phrase he had been repeating, hidden inside ordinary sentences.

Get it out in the open.

I get it, out here.

The sooner you get it out to the world, the better.

Get it out of the oven.

Get it out. Get It out.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Losers fight for Stanley.   
Stanley fights for his life.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> tw for suicidal ideation, body horror, and vomiting

Mike put down his fork. “You’re not Stanley, are you.”

Stan smiled. And smiled. The smile kept going, distorting his face. “Close,” said Stanley’s voice from Stanley’s mouth, as Stanley’s terrified hazel-brown eyes stared out at them. “He’s still in here, if that’s what you’re wondering. Barely, but I’m keeping him. He’s been useful, although I didn’t think he’d be stupid enough to fight back! Lucky I came in when I did. The body was almost destroyed before I could even slip in.”

What? thought Beverly, but her mouth was too dry to say it.

Eddie did. “Wait, what the fuck? Destroyed? What do you mean?”

Stanley’s jaw clenched. His own hand picked up a knife and dragged it teasingly along his throat, just grazing the skin.

The voice that came from his mouth sounded different. More sing-song and cheery. More like… Pennywise. “Tell them, Stanley. Tell your friends what you were thinking of doing, as if you were saving them, as if it would help!”

He opened his mouth to speak and gagged on teeth. Not his own, but loose teeth spilling out of his mouth and clattering onto his thighs. Baby teeth.

No one dared to move.

Stan coughed the last tooth into the napkin on his lap. “I mumblemumblemumble,” he said, blinking back frightened tears.

His other hand slapped him. “Speak up, and tell the truth. There’s a lot I can do with your body besides just make you talk… but I want to hear you say it, in your own words.”

Stan’s gaze fixed on the far wall, over everyone’s heads. “I tried to kill myself,” he said in a slow, clear monotone. “I tried to cut my wrists with the razor my wife uses to shave her legs, because my own was too blunt, and then when I was too weak to cut as deep as I needed, I tried to stop my heart by taking a lot of anti-anxiety medication.”

“And why did you do that?” Pennywise prompted, almost sweetly.

“Because I’m weak.” There was a trembling smile playing around his mouth, as if it was a relief to admit it. As if he was finally laying down some terrible weight. “I’m a coward. I’m a burden on all of you. I would put you all in danger, even if I didn’t come- and I don’t plan on battling It with you, because I’d be useless. I just… couldn’t bring myself to leave without saying goodbye.”

In the same sing-song tone: “And why would it be better for everyone if you were dead?”

Stan’s fingers clenched around the knife he had been made to hold. He swallowed. “I’m useless. I’m not smart, or creative, or funny. I don’t remember things I read in books. I’m not brave, and I don’t believe in things. Probably not even God. And I’m sorry. I’m so sorry I let all of you down by failing to die. I’m so pathetic, I can’t even kill myself right.”

Silence, stunned and shocked, as if a physical bomb had just been detonated on the table.

Richie- it was always Richie- was the first one to speak, his mouth running ahead of everything else the same as usual. “I’m sorry. And you meant to do what by revealing this knowledge? Let me guess- drive us apart? Force us to abandon Stan? Make us argue, make us hate him?”

“It’s working, isn’t it?” said Pennywise in Stan’s voice from nowhere and everywhere, at the same time as Stan said, “Yeah, why wouldn’t it?” looking puzzled and lost.

Everyone looked at him, and their expressions were just what Beverly was thinking: what the fuck? No!

“Oh, shit,” Stan’s mouth said- that was Pennywise, she was sure of it- and then Stan’s body bolted, like a puppet operated by a child, and smashed through the door. Stan’s body was lurching out of the restaurant an instant later. Everyone followed him.

“Sorry,” Ben yelled, tossing a couple of hundreds to the stunned maître’d as they all barreled past.

So much for eating a normal meal.

Stan’s body was being piloted towards the road. He didn’t know how to fight back, was barely able to keep from faceplanting onto the concrete. Probably if that happened, Pennywise would just keep dragging him forward anyway, even if it was like a cheese grater for his skin.

And then the motion stopped, right at the edge of the road. Cars zoomed past in the twilight, heedless of him. He was being given back control of his body, enough to do more than just make eye contact and slip in occasional words.

Why?

The next thoughts Pennywise transmitted to him were an answer. He wanted Stan to do the deed.

JUMP INTO TRAFFIC, STAN. I CAN MAKE IT QUICK. NO BACKING OUT THIS TIME, YOU COWARD. GOD YOU’RE PATHETIC. EVEN THOUGH IT MEANS THEY MIGHT LIVE YOU STILL HAVE TO BE MADE TO KILL YOURSELF-

-wait. And you know this how?

YOU’RE A COWARD, STANLEY URINE. YOU TOLD ME SO YOURSELF.

yes but why would I believe anything you say- you’re a liar you lie you lied to Georgie on a rainy day just like this one-

GET IT OVER WITH, STAN, RUN INTO THE ROAD NOW AND I PROMISE YOU’LL HARDLY FEEL ANY PAIN, YOUR FRIENDS WOULD BE BETTER OFF WITHOUT YOU ANYWAY, THEY DON’T NEED YOU THEY DON’T WANT YOU THEY DON’T-

no.

…WHAAAT?

you’re a monster. all you’ve ever done is twist this town. twist people into committing unspeakable violence. so why would I listen to you over my friends, who have told me that you’re fucking wrong? maybe I am a nebbishy coward, but you know what? they love me. And they want me here.

Its inhuman scream of unspeakable pain forced Stanley to his knees, muscles twitching uncontrollably.

In that moment, Stanley realized that It had entered into his head because he’d given it a door. His own fear, his conviction that nothing he could do to protect his friends could possibly ever be good enough, that there was nothing he could do- It could never have possessed him without that way in.

I was the one to open that door… and that means I can close it.

The Shema- the prayer recited at the moment of death, acknowledging the oneness and omnipotence of G-D- was supposed to have power. Stan went to synagogue at the High Holidays and whenever one of the neighbor’s kids was about to graduate from Hebrew school. He remembered two words of the Shema, at fucking most.

That didn’t matter. Other words had power, too.

“I know there are seventy-five monk parrots nesting in Greenwood Cementery in Brooklyn, and I know the European Starling was brought to America by a man who wanted to introduce all the birds mentioned in Shakespeare’s work to the Eastern United States, and I know laughing gulls were hunted to the point of being nearly extinct in the eighteen hundreds because ladies wanted their feathers to put on hats… and even with you in my head, I have free will!”

They caught up to Stanley flopping around on the sidewalk next to the turnpike. His eyes were rolled all the way back in his head, two solid white spheres, and his limbs bent the wrong way as if they were broken. He looked like he was trying to crawl in three different directions at once.

Suddenly, he sat up straight and screamed. The scream resolved into yelling with words. “You think I’ll respond rationally to someone saying it’s a sensible idea for me to be dead right now? I’m Jewish, you deformed piece of shit! I come from an entire dynasty of people who were fucking stupid to lay down and die, you are the passenger pigeon of people, TRY THIS CIRCUMSIZED DICK!”

And with that, he started puking. At first it was just normal puke- the half-digested remnants of the Chinese food, some sharp-looking fortune cookie shards that made his friends wince. Then it was something long and slimy that shone in the streetlights.

He threw up the woman from the painting that had scared him as a child, her body enlarging as it dripped out of his mouth, and he gagged around its saliva-covered squidlike bulk. At last it was over. The creature turned its head backward and scuttled away, slipping down a storm drain as fast as a rat.

Stanley fell to his hands and knees, gasping for breath. Bill was the first one to kneel by his side, largely due to elbowing everyone else out of the way.

“Hey,” he said, breathless. “Stan, are you-“

Mike, beside him, finished the sentence. “Are you okay?”

“Just me in here, if that’s what you mean,” Stan managed, still coughing. He wiped his mouth on his sleeve and then looked down at it for a moment, utterly disgusted with his ectoplasmic throwup. “I mean, I’m still incredibly fucking depressed, but you don’t have to stay up in shifts with me tonight or anything. Might give this whole staying alive thing a try, see where it goes”

“Tough, we’re staying up with you anyway,” Beverly told him, and Ben nodded.

Eddie knelt down on the gross sidewalk as well, but stayed just out of hugging distance. “As long as you take, like, three baths first. I also have mouthwash in my suitcase, and I’m going to politely but firmly suggest that you use at least half the bottle.”

“You smell so fucking bad,” Richie said lovingly, drawing everyone into a hug. He planted a big smooch on Stan’s sweat-matted curls. “That was so gross. Like anime gone horribly wrong. I’m going to have nightmares about you puking up The Scream for the rest of my life.”

“Go easy on him, Trashmouth,” Eddie would have said, except that actually got Stan to make eye contact. And even though there were still tears in his eyes and open wounds under his suit jacket, he actually laughed.

(Stan didn’t know this yet, but he’d struck a serious blow to the seemingly immortal monster. By refusing to believe in the ideas it injected directly into his brain, closing his ears to its seductive whisper of hopelessness, he’d cut it off from a valuable source of belief. Even now, that part of It scuttled through the sewers in its truest form to rejoin with the rest of It, shivering with pain and… something less familiar.

Fear.

It would tend its eggs and plot slow, delectable vengeance. Plan to go for an easier target next, like Audra, or use a pawn to do Its work, like Henry or Tom.

It didn’t know this yet, but the next serious blow the Losers struck, with Eddie in the vanguard, would be the last it could survive.)

**Author's Note:**

> -stephen king's "the dark tower" series was inspired by robert browning's poem "childe rolande to the dark tower came," hence Bill being into Elizabeth Barrett Browning, aka Robert Browning's wife  
-'sedanley' is canon- it seems like King gave his personality and career to Bill, but his relationship with his wife to Stanley, because Lisey in Lisey's Story, who's based on his wife, has the same nickname (baby love, also spelled babyluv)  
-'The Cannibals' was the title that Stephen King used for an unpublished first draft of Under The Dome.  
-all of the places in Pittsburgh that Stan mentions are actual places in Pittsburgh!


End file.
